I get asked this a lot. Usually by someone who has been running a Facebook page for a couple of years and is doing fine on it. They want to know whether a website is worth the money, or whether it is just something web designers tell people they need.
Fair question. So here is an honest answer, including the part where I tell you that sometimes a social page really is enough.
What you own and what you do not
Your Facebook page is not yours. Neither is your Instagram account, your TikTok, or your LinkedIn company page. You have been given a space to use, for free, on the condition that you keep playing by rules you did not write and cannot change.
That is fine until it is not. Accounts get suspended by mistake, pages get locked when the person who set them up leaves the business, and content gets flagged by software that does not understand what your business actually does. When that happens there is no phone number to ring. You fill in a form and wait.
You would not build a castle on rented sand. But that is what most small businesses do with their online presence, and it works right up until the day it does not.
A website is different because you own it. You own the domain name. You own the words and the pictures. If you fall out with your host, you move it somewhere else and take everything with you. Nobody can switch it off because of a rule change.
Platforms change, and they do not ask you first
I have been building websites since the 1990s, so I have watched a lot of this happen.
Google Plus is the one I always come back to. Businesses were told to set up a page. Plenty did, because it came from Google and it seemed sensible for search. Then Google shut the whole thing down in 2019 and all of it went. Not the reach, not the ranking. All of it.
Facebook is a slower version of the same story. Around 2018 the reach on business pages dropped off a cliff. People who had spent years building up followers found their posts were being shown to almost none of them. Nothing about the business had changed. The rules had.
Twitter became X and a lot of accounts never really recovered. Some businesses walked away. Others stayed and found the audience they had built was not behaving the same way.
None of those businesses did anything wrong. They just had everything in one place, and that place belonged to somebody else.
This is the part people underestimate.
When someone needs a plumber in Harrogate, or wants to know if a pub is doing food on a Sunday, they search. They do not open Facebook and scroll. They type what they want into their phone and pick something from the results.
And the things they want to know are painfully practical.
- Are you open on the bank holiday Monday
- Do you cover Knaresborough, or just Harrogate
- Is there parking
- Roughly what does this cost
- Can I get a wheelchair in
- Do you do the specific thing I need, or only something close to it
A social media page is built around what you posted most recently. It is not built to answer a question. Your opening hours might be in a post from March, buried under forty other posts. Your prices might be in a comment reply. The answer someone needs might be there somewhere, but they are not going to dig for it. They will go back to the search results and click on somebody else.
A website is built the other way round. Someone asks a question, and the page that answers it is the page they land on. That is the whole point of it.
Sometimes it genuinely is, and I will say so.
If you sell at a market once a month and your customers are people who already know you, a Facebook page does the job. If you are testing an idea and you are not sure you will still be doing it in six months, do not spend eighteen hundred pounds finding out. If all your work comes through word of mouth and you have as much of it as you want, you do not have a problem that a website solves.
I would rather tell you that than sell you something you do not need. It is not much of a business model, but it is how I like to work.
When it stops being enough
Two things usually tip it.
The first is when you want to be found by strangers rather than friends. Social media is very good at reaching people who already follow you. It is not good at being found by someone in Harrogate who has never heard of you and has a problem right now. That person is searching, and a website is how you turn up in front of them.
The second is being taken seriously. This one is harder to measure but people feel it. If someone is about to spend a few thousand pounds with you, or hand you a job in their house, or put your organisation forward for funding, they will look you up. A page with a link tree and some posts says one thing. A website with your work on it, your prices, and a way to get hold of you says something else.
Neither of those is about design awards. It is about looking like a business that is still going to be here next year.
You want both, really
None of this is an argument for dropping social media. It is good at what it is good at. It shows people what you are like, it keeps you in front of the people who already know you, and it costs nothing but time.
Use it for that. Just do not let it be the only place your business exists.
Post on social. Send people to the website. Own the bit at the end.
If you are somewhere in the middle of this and not sure which side you are on, book a twenty minute call and I will tell you honestly. If you do not need a website yet, I will say that too.
